Researchers found major discrepancies between safety features on TikTok Lite and the flagship TikTok app.
ADVERTISEMENTA mini version of TikTok, designed for parts of the world with slower connectivity speeds, is a “safety hazard,” warns a new report.
TikTok Lite, a low-bandwith app alternative to TikTok, lacks basic protections compared to the original model, including content labels for graphic, artificial intelligence-generated, misinformation, and dangerous acts videos, according to a report by the non-profits Mozilla and AI Forensics released on Tuesday.
The researchers said multiple safety guardrails are easy to integrate into TikTok Lite without increasing the app’s size, which consumes about 30 MB of phone data.
“The safety features TikTok Lite lacks aren’t complex and are perfectly compatible with a lower-bandwidth app,” said Claudio Agosti, co-founder of AI Forensics.
“TikTok’s decision to ignore these safety measures is clearly a choice, not a technical necessity”.
Top TikTok Lite users come from India, Brazil, and Indonesia. It is currently not available in the United States and the majority of Europe.
The report found that, compared to TikTok, the lighter version provides no warning labels for potentially harmful content, such as dangerous prank videos and graphic content to health and elections-related misinformation and AI-generated content.
Researchers also found that compared to the most popular version, TikTok Lite lacks controls such as the ability to filter offensive content and unwanted keywords and screen management tools that can mitigate app addiction.
‘Double standards’
“We wonder if there is basically a double standard depending on the countries that the platform is working with,” Salvatore Romano, who leads research at AI Forensics, told Euronews Next.
We usually hear TickTok saying they are trying to do their best but it's a very clear case, where it seems they are having different standards across the world”.
Romano said this can be problematic when those countries have lower digital standards compared to countries in Europe or the US which have more stringent rules.
TikTok is not the only tech platform to launch a “lite” version to target developing countries that have basic mobile phones or slow Internet connectivity. Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and even Tinder also have their own models.
However, the main TikTok app is available in every country where TikTok Lite app can be used and the company says that content that violates its policies is removed from TikTok Lite in the same way as TikTok.
The report said that tech platforms have a history of neglecting non-Western users, where there is markedly less potential for constraining regulation and enforcement.
But the Brussels effect, Europe's regulatory influence and market power around the world, is not the way to go as creating a different tech ecosystem is not the issue, said Mozilla Fellow, Odanga Madung, who is based in Kenya.
ADVERTISEMENT“Nobody has a problem with you creating different versions of the app across the world as circumstances are different and they wouldn’t be the first application to do it,” he said.
“But the guidelines that are in place should also be the case, at least in the smaller versions of the applications”.
Romano, who is based in Spain, initially approached Madungo to discuss TikTok and like many in the West, had not heard of TikTok Lite.
Another issue is that there is a context bias in creating different versions for other parts of the world.
ADVERTISEMENT“The people that make a lot of these types of ecosystems are only able to review them and perhaps work on them based off of their next experience, which is largely Western,” Madung said.
TikTok says it aims to seek local input and does have eight regional safety advisory councils in Asia Pacific, Latin America and in the Middle East and North Africa.
How did TikTok respond?
“There are several factual inaccuracies in this report which fundamentally misrepresent our approach to safety,” a TikTok spokesperson told Euronews Next in an email.
“The fact is content that breaks our rules is removed from TikTok Lite the same way as our main app and we offer numerous safety features which we would have explained if Mozilla asked us before publishing their report”.
ADVERTISEMENTTikTok said it would have engaged with Mozilla and explained that the reduced descriptions are a bug that the company is working to fix.
However, Mozilla told Euronews Next it had reached out to Mozilla with the report ahead of publication and was told there were inaccuracies, without specifying which.
TikTok told Euronews Next that the inaccuracies included a claim that there are 1 billion TikTok Lite users, pointing out that there are 1 billion users of the main TikTok app, not for the Lite version.
TikTok also said that TikTok Lite is not available in France and Spain, which the report does mention and makes clear when talking about a different version of TikTok Lite that was previously available in Europe and criticised by the European Union.
ADVERTISEMENTEU concerns
In April, another version of TikTok Lite fell foul of European regulators after a silent launch in France and Spain in April.
The EU voiced its concerns over a separate reward programme, which gave users over 18 the ability to earn points through liking videos, creators and referring people to the app in return for points that can be used for Amazon vouchers or its TikTok currency that allows you to pay creators.
In April, TikTok said it would voluntarily suspend TikTok Lite's reward programme amid the EU's concerns.
"TikTok always seeks to engage constructively with the EU Commission and other regulators. We are therefore voluntarily suspending the rewards functions in TikTok Lite while we address the concerns that they have raised," the company said.
ADVERTISEMENTIn February, the Commission opened its first formal proceedings against TikTok to assess whether it may have failed to comply with the bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA) in areas such as the protection of minors, advertising transparency, data access for researchers, as well as the risk management of addictive design and harmful content.
The investigation is ongoing.
How was the report made?
The new report conducted a comparative analysis of TikTok Lite - Save Data and the main TikTok app, scrutinising the availability of each feature in both versions.
It reviewed a sample of over 120 videos. Visual documentation, in the form of screenshots, meticulously catalogued any disparities observed between the two applications.
ADVERTISEMENTThe versions of TikTok Lite -Save Data tested were from Kenya, Uganda, South Africa, and Chile.
